In a mid budget hotel in central Manchester, the CEO of a small software company took the stage to address his staff. It was the day after his 50th birthday, business was going well, but a plot had been hatched. There were no traitors at the gate on this occasion. We are not Nabisco. Merely the pleasant surprise of a presentation of a birthday gift, a certain, and very generous, bottle of wine.
Rhone wines can be easily overlooked, and yet many rival the finest Bordeaux, as anyone who has tried Hermitage La Chapelle will tell you.
This Vinsobres comes from the Southern Rhone, is inky in colour and robust, spicy, tannic and plummy in taste. It’s a George Galloway of a wine. Feisty, intelligent, slightly unbalanced and available for purchase. Which you can do at Berry Bros. and Rudd for £14.95. At this price it’s a steal, but, unless you like wines that go with a blue steak, or that make you feel like you are doing a Vito Corleone impression with wet tea bags in your cheeks, I would recommend holding on for a few more years or so before drinking.
Quite earthy and rich and tasting of beetroot and tomato purée with some plummy fruits and vanilla thrown in, this Côtes du Rhône Villages goes brilliantly with Heinz tomato soup, which if you are over 9, only really tastes acceptable when accompanied by a tipper truck load of ground black pepper and a toasted white pitta bread.
So, having set a British & Commonwealth record for the longest opening sentence on a Confessions post, my mind turned to where I may have procured this very decent tasting bottle, and its pecuniary value, given that I (unusually for me) kept no record, nor scrawled any details on the label, and whether I was also going to set a record for the second sentence, and penultimate paragraph before I ran out of breath and all remaining readers had passed out, so I wantonly speculated that this was probably a £7.50 wine and turned to Lord Google.
It is rather nice, so I shouldn’t have really been so surprised to find it at Berry Bros.  They only have it In Bond (for delivery when?) at £130 per case which is just under £11, but normally one must add shipping and VAT, so maybe my estimate is out by a factor of two?  Hmm I might stretch to that for a couple of bottles, but the price does appear to have been influenced by a Parker rating of 88-90.
The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive – John Sladek.
Buying wine futures is no different to taking a long position on Brent crude, although the end result is often tastier – Me.
Except buying en primeur is fun and when I stick to the more reasonable end of the price range I frequently get outperforming wines for the price. This Crozes-Hermitages was a great example at about £10 per bottle.
It is reassuring, in a Savile Row tailor sense, to see that after 311 years of tradition, Berry Bros & Rudd is innovating. There has been a technology EXPLOSION recently with a well constructed and very readable blog, a whizzy website and now an iPhone app.
As an iPhone addict, who gets frustrated at not even being able to delete an email whilst on the tube, it is refreshing to see that the app is available offline.
It’s a must-have for wine geeks. For example, if you want to check the retail price of an overpriced bottle in Gaucho Grill, you can do so discreetly, under the table, and then argue righteously and indignantly with the waiter about how you object to being fleeced by a two bit South American theme park (that happens to serve great steaks).
Then again, BBR has a disappointing range of Argentineans – a mere nine wines (compared to 190 champagnes and 391 clarets). And if you actually want to order a wine you have to go to the BBR website – but this is a small complaint that I feel sure they will resolve in good time. Hopefully not another 311 years.
To pass the time during my New Year detox, I have been hoovering up wine bargains to stock up for the year ahead and to get my taste buds flowering in anticipation.
Two bargains stand out from the crowd, one from Costco, one from the Wine Society. One Champagne, the other red wine but from a relatively close starting point.
La Bocana is a great waterfront bar just at the entrance to the harbour so you can watch all the idiots powerboating in and out, in what Jeffo calls their “penis extensions”.
Stumble It!